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DEL.ICIO.USMilitary a path to citizenship for Cuba native
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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| Louie Favorite / AJC |
| “I’m pretty thankful for everything I have in the United States,” Hector Arbosferrer says. “I worked hard for it.” |
Every father wants a daughter to be proud of him.
Hector Arbosferrer is no exception. When Daniela turned 5, he worried she would be embarrassed to say her daddy was an immigrant who worked as a mechanic in a carpet mill in Dalton.
He wanted more for her.
He joined the Army.
A year after his enlistment, 26-year-old Arbosferrer finds himself in Iraq, risking his life for a country of which he is not even a citizen yet. And he is quietly fighting a battle of his own to change that.
Arbosferrer is one of a number of men and women in uniform who are still citizens of other countries. He carries not just a foreign passport, but one from a nation considered an enemy of the United States: Cuba.
A specialist with Company H, 121st Infantry (ABN) (LRS), Arbosferrer is stationed at Forward Operating Base Sykes, near Tal Afar, and has been there since August. He applied for citizenship more than a year ago and was hoping his service to America would expedite the process. A 2002 executive order signed by President Bush waives some procedures for those serving in the armed forces.
But a series of bureaucratic mishaps has kept Arbosferrer from standing at al-Faw Palace in Baghdad’s Camp Liberty, where naturalization ceremonies are held, and taking the oath of allegiance. He dreams of that happening this summer before he leaves Iraq.
“I’m pretty thankful for everything I have in the United States,” he says. “I worked hard for it.”
Arbosferrer was born and raised in Santiago de Cuba, a city surrounded by sand and sea on the eastern end of the Caribbean island. His father owned a house on the beach and taught him diving and spearfishing.
In 1996, after his parents divorced, his mother, Ileana, immigrated to America with him and his sister Nancy.
He was only 15 then. His Hollywood visions of America were wiped out within seconds of his arrival at Miami’s airport. His grandfather, a retired construction worker, picked them up and drove them to his modest house.
Life was not easy. Arbosferrer ended up dropping out of school and marrying his girlfriend, Yajara, when he was only 17. They have three children.
When he joined the Georgia Army National Guard in 2005, Arbosferrer could not speak English. He learned the language in basic training.
The Army has given him a sense of accomplishment that might have eluded him otherwise, he says. It has given him the friends he lacked in Dalton.
But it has also put him in a precarious position. The United States has severed all relations with Cuba. As an American soldier, Arbosferrer knows he cannot go back to live there - not unless the political climate changes. In fact, he has not even told his family in Santiago of his military adventures.
“Nobody in Cuba knows,” he says. “I’m afraid of what they might do to my family.”
Not one for politics, Arbosferrer believes the Cuban government is manipulative and authoritarian. But he also thinks “it’s like any other government. If you mess with them, you will get crushed.”
Still, he misses the sound of the waves and the laughter of his boyhood friends.
He displays a small sticker of the Cuban flag on his Humvee windshield as proudly as he wears the Stars and Stripes on the right shoulder of his uniform.
On a mission out on the Syrian border, the rest of Arbosferrer’s platoon takes advantage of an afternoon lull to catch a quick nap or play a round of Yahtzee.
The young Cuban with the freckled face and clean-shaven head sits by himself on the hood of his truck. Slight in size compared with some of his platoon mates, Arbosferrer is quiet — he rarely talks about the life he left behind.
In his hands is a thick biography of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the iconic Latin American revolutionary executed in 1967 by the Bolivian army under the instructions of the United States.
“He’s one of my heroes,” he says of the man who eventually became the most famous face of Cuban communism. Cuban schools had their own agenda in their portrayal of Che. Arbosferrer wanted to make up his own mind. Next is the epic biography by Jon Lee Anderson.
“The Cubans put a twist on things,” he says. “I never trusted Cuban history. I’m not into communism, capitalism — any kind of politics.”
But after reading up on Che, Arbosferrer can say that he admires the revolutionary’s toughness and “who he was as a man.”
Ultimately, Arbosferrer believes, it is not country or ideology that builds character. It is the soldier within.
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By rhinaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
April 7, 2007 10:18 PM | Link to this
i always thought cubans got automatic citizenship since their fanatic community holds sway in the all important state of florida.